WHAT WE ARE OWED

Technology and genealogy have made the case for reparations specific-and undeniable.

- Wesley Lowery

Alvin Taylor still remembers the sight each day as he’d return from school, of more houses in his neighborhood being burned to the ground. He was about 8 years old when the fires came for his home. Fenita Kirkwood recalls listening, as a 9-year-old girl, to her father arguing with men who had come to their doorstep to insist they had to leave. “That big yellow bulldozer pulled up in front of our house on a Friday,” remembers Lawrence Williams, who ran inside to fetch his mother. “I came in later and she was in the kitchen crying, asking God, ‘What are we going to do?’”

They were all children at the time, living in Section 14, a small plot of tribal land near downtown Palm Springs, California, in the mid-1960s. The city itself remained strictly segregated, and so their parents had helped to build a sort of shantytown out of trailers, wooden shacks, and small concrete dwellings—a mixed-race community that housed many of Palm Springs’ working-­class Black residents. “We built a thriving community. There were businesses, churches…It was an actual village where people helped raise each other’s children, and we borrowed eggs from next door,” explains Pearl Devers, who was 12 years old when a change in federal law eased development restrictions on federal land—meaning there was significant money to be made by clearing residents from it.

The city condemned their properties, then proceeded to burn Section 14 to the ground. State officials later wrote that it amounted to a “city-engineered holocaust,” concluding, “Palm Springs ignored that the residents of Section 14 were human beings.”